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Digital Design
'Kay Friedrichs
Kay Friedrichs
DIGITAL DESIGN After Einstein, there are no more eternal scientific truths, only relative ones. After Hiroshima, there is no war, "mon amour!" After Chernobyl there is no absolute technical safety. Why do we still need ecology after all the forests and seas? We are creating more and more artificial worlds!
Because of photographic, film, video and computer technologies, there are no more authentic representations; there is only a new industrial apparatus. Inside computers, all digital and analog media meld into a sort of hypermedium, into an imagination apparatus. Thirty years at the latest after Marshall McLuhan's "Gutenberg Galaxis" (1962), and after the culture shock of the animated film "The power of ten" (Charles Eames, 1968), the fact should be clear that the future will bring the informatization of all professions, including architecture. Digital design!
"Railways and the cinema, time without space and space without time have been thrown together in the new media and in the new travels: Railways and the cinema are simultaneous. We can no longer know whether we are looking out a window while in motion or whether a film is being shown while we are sitting still." Georg Seeglen (from "Traum-Zeit-Kino", in: Tholen, Christoph, at. al., "Zeitreise", p. 74, Zurich 1993)TIME SPACES The phenomenon of the societal acceleration of the productive powers has seldom been described in a more poetic way. Similarly to the changes in the perception of time brought about by the introduction of the cinema and railway travel in the 19th century, we can at present observe a subliminal dynamization of the construction industry brought about by informatization. Building does not primarily mean movement for architects, but suspension, the attempt to find a certain position relative to a determination of a position, and therefore in relation to the general conditions and to the structures which have already been built. For most architects, this implies delimitation on a stylistic level. Of course, formal and also aesthetic points of view in the organization of "a space within a space" are classic duties of architecture. In spite of that, we will be dealing with structures in the 21st century, which will be more dynamic with regard to their predictability, their foreseeability, and we are planning for this at present. Architecture was and is a way to find the future. Architects and urban planners are "personified" futurists. Their finding of positions and "perspective" has ceased to be static since the Renaissance at the latest; its execution is oriented towards the future, in consideration of space and time, of movement and speed. It no longer takes place in relation to human speeds alone, but to those accelerated with the aid of machines and apparatuses to 100 or 150 kph, Mach 1 to the speed of light, to the "realtime" of digital systems!
Speed is not a characteristic "in itself". Rather, the complexity of determining location and of the general conditions increases along with it. Both disperse if necessary, as if we were to observe the situation from an object that is moving quickly. The assessment is made among the endless dimensions of an open system of open systems; it is speculative, paradoxical and conforms to, if anything at all, a hyper-law, the calculation of probability. The basic tendency of modern architecture is "faster than ever", and above all, "faster than the others". Superficially, it consists in an aesthetic "dromologization", a sequence of probable architectures which becomes faster and faster.THE CITY In connection with the new technologies and worldwide communication networks, the frenzied change in work structures has forced not only older industrial branches such as steel, coal and the production of mass-consumption goods into a structural crisis; it has had the same effect on the spatial and temporal zoning of urban structures also. The formerly functional city, which does not "function" very well now, is being subjected to powerful forces of change. The "functional" city is explained as a side effect of the Industrial Revolution and "Fordism". At the beginning of this century, Henry Ford's basic invention was (in addition to scientific management and production planning which includes division of the work process into relatively small, temporally defined segments) the discovery of the worker as a consumer. The impression that the city, under the influence of this boom in labor, mass-produced articles and consumption of these articles, could be subjected to categories of order as another instrument of rigid mass production is well grounded. It was spatially zoned according to "Fordist" production logistics, divided into cities of work, living and recreation. Just as with the mechanization process in the 19th century, "Fordism" seems to have exercised an important influence in that organizational principles of production were applied to the public sphere (the city in this case). The spatial zoning of the factory into specific production rooms and areas according to optimum scientific rules, supply and waste removal by means of clever logistics, and the temporal organization of the work processes in the form of chronological "work cadences" corresponded to a new urban-planning motif of the functional city – zoning. Zoning forced the separation of the various spheres of life, both at home and in the city, and networked them with "traffic areas" and means of transportation."The city is, according to its nature, the location of a variety of activities. In the case of industrial enterprises such as cement and chemical factories, steel mills and slaughterhouses, however, spatial isolation is desirable and also justifies relatively long distances to the workplace. Even in the case of factories in which electronic goods are produced, the necessity of rail facilities and other, extensive facilities requires that the entire area is independent of the road network and separated from the rest of the city by at least one lay-by. Such industrial zones and closed factory development belong to the best features of the British New Towns, which were borne in Welwyn Garden City. The separation of the steel mill from the workers' residential area …"
(Mumford, Lewis, 1980) For Le Corbusier, the modern factory was practically the model for his organization and production of apartment and city, including his model of the "machine for living in". In "La Charte d' Athens" ("The Charter of Athens"), zoning the city according to functional areas into spaces for working and living, and consumption and recreation was proclaimed expressly. The principle of zoning introduced an explicit category of order; it occupies the most important technical terms and also permeates the legal regulations: It creates areas for traffic and relaxation, plumbing units and areas for eating in the "microdomain" of architecture; It provides shopping zones, industrial and commercial parks, and mixed and pure residential areas in the "midi-domain" of urban planning, and in the "macro-domain" of urban and regional planning, it leads to developmental axes, upper and middle urban centers, to protected agricultural and ecological priority areas.
When the previously static spatial zoning and the repetitive temporal cadences of "Fordist" production is modernized with the intention of attaining spatial and temporal flexibility and with the intention of attaining integrated production methods, the city's structure will not be unaffected. The motif of the highly integrated and flexible "intelligent city", which is equipped with "soft" advantages of location, will follow the motif of the hard "functional" city for the 21st century.THE NEW CITY One of the first international contests in which these qualities were expressly called for was the "International Concept Design Competition for an Advanced Information City" (Kawasaki, 1986/87). The organizers of this contest were the "Mainichi Newspaper" and the state organization for urban planning. Kawasaki City, a condensed urban region south of Tokyo shaped like a band, resembles the Ruhr region in Germany. According to the documents, this city was to be transformed into a campus.
In Kawasaki City Plan 2001, the highest priority was given to the goal of a human city. By means of various changes, these human dimensions were intended to develop the so-called City Identity (CI) to a level which would lead Kawasaki away from its previous inconspicuous anonymity and place it on a level with other Japanese cities such as Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto or Osaka. Plans were requested for the following elements of city planning:- "intelligent plazas",
- the Kawasaki Institute of Technology (KIT), a regular Campus City Festival and
- an intelligent network of continuing-education schools which correspond to the ideal type of:
- decentral, though networked, production facilities,
- living environments and social networks which are suited to the elderly and the handicapped,
- the international transfer of technology, a community security system,
- public local and regional traffic systems for mass and individual transit,
- a well-informed public.
As pathetic as the IRIS Plan of 1985 may sound, this concept for Kawasaki must not be understood in a solely metaphorical sense. It follows a fundamental change in paradigms in the field of urban planning. It indicates the search for an innovative urban identity, which is committed to Occidental humanitarian traditions on the basis of the organic American University structures. The claim of assuming the life-long responsibility for the well being of all its residents as a city has its roots in the Japanese moral code of caring for the family. Transforming Kawasaki into a permanent university is not really a goal of the plan. Rather, it intends to combine the advantages of the traditional Japanese social duty of providing care and mutual identification with the advantages provided by the modern information society. In this way, the new city of Kawasaki would instrumentalize the services of the discrete information networks, which are made available to the residents at many decentralized locations and which are intended to accelerate a diffusion of the new technologies into the economies of small and medium-sized enterprises. The strengthening of the soft human local factors will flank the expected hard economic push. With this spatial and temporal decentralization and increase in flexibility, made in the face of an international meshing of production which was unequally more extensive, the information and communication technologies will become strategically important. In addition to the military complex, it was above all the banks, the international insurance, capital and stock market brokers who, as the "avant-garde" so to speak, simultaneously demonstrated the extent to which the new work structures made possible by telecommunications can be effective in the fields of urban planning and architecture when they are applied to a wide range of production and service areas. They accomplished this by means of their consistent implementation of these technologies. Although, in my opinion, the special situation of the financial metropolises (see Sassen, 1991) cannot be applied generally, I do think that the "Intelligent City" or "Global City" and the motif of the "Intelligent Building" can only be described graphically and understood on the basis of the highly advanced degree of the permeation of work structures by the new technologies.
As a working thesis, let us say that the motif of an "Intelligent City" is a new form of the "Functional City", a "Global City of Labor" which adapts to the needs of the new service and production structures establishing themselves within it by means of appropriate new work and traffic qualities and new offerings of apartments and leisure-time facilities.INTERFACE DESIGN For architects and our ideas of a built-up environment, the prospects of global networking and a communication environment are naturally much more dramatic. Assuming that the shells, which have been static up until now are made increasingly dynamic and deprivatized, and working and living conditions are made mobile by the technological innovations, and illusion and reality coincide, what is then the point of this "Real, Constructed Environment" to this specialized degree? Interface design will become the focus of interest of architects, designers, software engineers, etc. Because the information technologies have made progress in the areas of Digital Media (DM), Telecommunications (TC), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR). It now seems possible, through their integration, to develop a new basic technology. We call this technology Digital Design. The purpose of this integral, scientific working, communication and living environment is the selective processing of large amounts of data of great complexity and variety while modulating time in the computer. Highspeed networks, compression and integration within the new technology permit a qualitative jump in the processing of information and knowledge. They pave the way for an enormous potential for new services and areas of application in science, industry and administration on an unequally higher level than before. The data are depicted by means of various digital media (text, graphics, sound, music, images, video, etc.). They are ubiquitous, i.e. telepresent at various physical locations (TC). They are equipped with an advanced range of functions (AI) and possess a presence that addresses the human senses MI.
With this basic technology, many different previously isolated knowledge bases and information technologies can be integrated and new hybrid areas of application can be opened up. Let us then concentrate on a few areas of application that we can easily imagine. Using various examples of Digital Design (see illustrations of our simulations in the EVE-Extended Virtual Environment at the MultiMediale 3, Karlsruhe 1993), they are to be developed into, for instance, a digital factory, a digital laboratory or office and a digital region. All examples are similar in that complex real correlations or functional areas are replaced, complemented or made possible by digital representations. In the examples of application described, a holistic representation of real and virtual correlations is the goal.
Should this effort be successful, a company's office buildings, for example, could actually be spread throughout the world, and still be coupled as a Digital Office in such a way that the company is architecturally, organizationally and socially present as a unit at all of its actual locations (see Erich Kiefer, 1993). This concept corresponds to that of a holographic image which, even when it is broken into many pieces, contains the sum total of its information in every fragment. In addition, Digital Design offers considerable advantages when working with very large and therefore unavoidably difficult to manage and, at times, contradictorily organized amounts of data in comparison to conventional methods of data integration.
The example of a Digital Library should make these facts obvious. It will be possible to combine software, which enables access to databases around the world even today, but is still controlled alphanumerically or via inquiry masks and menus into a huge imaginary global library - a digital building in which the great libraries of the world – whether real or virtual – make up the various departments. On the basis of the virtual architecture, the users, wherever they happen to be, will be able to orient themselves and obtain an overview quickly in the face of huge amounts of data and in a way that is easy to remember. An important aspect of the Digital Sphere is its internationality. Its non-lingual, spatial and visual orientation does not require a translation. It is a matter of course and predestined to be a platform for worldwide digital cooperation and communication.
Furthermore, let us imagine the scenario of a Digital Region, that of a relatively large regional context, e.g. the upper Rhine valley. This region, which stretches from Mannheim to Basel, is represented in a multimedia visualization of the anthropogeography and biogeography. It would be possible to integrate and visualize the databases of various scientific, industrial and community institutions in such a way so that links and interdependencies can be made visible by simply clicking real representations (the structures of city planning, streets, landscapes, rivers, agricultural utilizations, biotopes, etc.). Furthermore, these databases can be explored gradually with regard to quality, thereby simulating and modeling future scenarios step by step in which, e.g. the interplays of anthroposperes and ecospheres can be displayed.
In these examples, one of the first steps deals with equipping the data elements with receptors, behaviors and appearances which are as natural as possible. The digital representations and architectures are more useful and can be better utilized and understood by specialists and computer laymen on the level of the Naive lnterfaces (NO than is the case with conventional interfaces. After beginning with this first step, new artificial spaces will be explored. These spaces will be able to depict correlations as desired which possess a similar presence in their representations (Scientific Visualization / SV). For this reason, they can be regarded as "thought amplifiers", e.g. in cognitive processes. "Digital Design's" underlying technology consists of four important components:- a database organization which integrates the representational techniques (qualitative, quantitative and subsymbolic) known to us,
- from the integration of current developments in the areas of TC, DIV, VR and Al to a unified, functional platform,
- from "Digital Design" itself, which subsumes the manifold technical possibilities of the other areas under a consistent topographical representation,
- from the computer's own "time modulation" in which the positive and negative acceleration and also the reversal of the time axis (-t) will be permitted and it will be possible to depict "Time Spaces".
The result of these efforts would be a communication and control environment in which the metaphor of the "desktop" would be replaced by digital navigation in "virtual environments". The opportunities offered by this new platform will lead to models for a digital library, a digital office, a digital factory or a digital region in the next few years which we and others will visualize. In this connection, we point out the considerable efforts to achieve integration of the media, telecommunications, the technologies of Virtual Reality and modern man-machine interfaces, especially in Japan and the USA in addition to earlier visions, e.g. the "DynaBook" by Allan Kay, and current related studies on the meaning of these future technologies (see EPA '92). These references suggest the verification of the possibilities of TimeDesign as extensively as possible (10 years) and their realization as prototypes. Our students' multimedia designs and the works produced by our team in Karlsruhe, among them "BelleAir" by Volkmar Hovestadt (Dusseldorf), the "EVE" installation "Digitale Planungsräume" ("Digital Planning Spaces") by Christian Ziegler in cooperation with Jeffrey Shaw (see illustrations), the IFIB animation film "a4" by Ludger Hovestadt and "Lovers Leap" in cooperation Miroslaw Rogala and Ford Oxaal, are all small steps in this direction.
Literature:
EAMES, CHARLES & RAY: Eames Design. New York, 1989
EPA: Technologieprognose für das Jahr 2010. Tokyo 1992
GAUCHEL, WYK, BHAT, HOVESTADT: Building Modelling Based on Concepts of Autonomy, in Gero 1992: Artifical Intelligence in Design '92, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht / Boston / London, 1992
KIEFER. ERICH: Die Zukunft: Telearbeit und Virtuelle Organisation. Darmstadt, 1993
KNABE. GOTTFRIED: Gebäudeautomation. München, 1992
MCLUHAN, MARSHALL: Das Medium ist Message, Ullstein. Berlin, 1967
MUMFORD, LEWIS: Die Stadt. dtv, München,1980
ROSE, MICHAEL: Schnelle Designs mit Basic Briefmarke, Hüthig. Heidelberg, 1993
SASSEN, SASKIA: The Global City. N.Y., London, Tokyo, Princton Press, New Jersey, 1991
SCHIVELBUSCH, WOLFGANG: Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, Ullstein Materialien, Frankfurt / Berlin, 1979
STEINER, DIETMAR: Die Stadt, ein Gebäude in dieser Stadt, in artimage: filmarc, Graz, 1993
THOLEN, CHRISTOPH, U.A.: Zeitreise, Bilder Maschinen Strategien Rätsel, Stroemfeld, Zürich, 1993
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